Thursday, March 27, 2008

Interview with Dimitri Glazkov

I am a software engineer at a company in Birmingham, AL, developing a content management engine for higher education and government Web sites across the country. My passion is building a better Web. A while back, I became convinced that a better Web starts with _not hating the Web_. And so began my quest into semantic markup, microformats, REST, and everything around them.

This part is so right on:

The Web has been and always will be defined by openness. Participation and social networking are just its logical extensions. It's pretty clear that the next frontier will have something to do with breaking down the barriers, imposed, knowingly or not, by the first generation of the social networking sites. The technology will have to play an important role in that charge. OpenID and OAuth are steadily gaining strength, and I am sure we'll start seeing the next generation of sites that value and appreciate user's freedom as well respect of content ownership. Also, as new features demand new capabilities, the browser becomes the weakest link. Looking at HTML5 spec and Javascript 2, my bet is on that changing really soon.

And of course the obligatory Gears shout-out:

NR: Do you have any current or future projects you're working on you'd like to share with us?

DG: Gears. That's an open-source project, led by Google, which aims to both level and elevate the playing field for Web developers, and allow them to step beyond the today's line in the sand. I am proud to be a part of the effort that's as open and pioneering as Google Gears.

NR: What does Google Gears let us do today that could help, say, Beth Kanter, do a better job of fund raising? How does it enable us to change the world?

DG: Gears could allow Twitter to finally build a site that handles traffic more gracefully by offloading some of the work onto the client, rather than keeping it all on the melting-hot server side.

Dimitri's been backing his statements up with code, helping out with creating an HTML 5 database implementation for Gears known as Database2.